I’ve always been interested in the body, and how we talk about it. When
I was eight my mother explained to my brother how they had been connected in her
womb through their combined umbilical cords: ‘mine attached to yours’, she
said, which didn’t sound quite right to me. I could sense the determination in her
words though, the sense of ownership involved in explaining their physical bond.
At secondary school my sex education lessons, brutally indifferent to feelings, resolved that physical
conundrum, but not the sense of wonder by which we – wriggling in embarrassment
on high wooden stools – tried to imagine what lurked beneath our skin. At
university, I learned how long men and women had been trying to understand the
human body; to account for the gift of life as well as the those ‘thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ (Hamlet,
III, I, 1755) To this end Shakespeare was our ‘contemporary,’ at least
according to Jan Kott; his characters experiencing their physical and emotional
worlds as dramatically as we do.

18th century allegorical depictions of the temperaments formed by the
four humours: melancholicus. By: J. D.
Nessenthaler. Credit: Wellcome Library.

But there’s the rub. We experience the world differently from Hamlet. Our
bodies are not viewed the same today as they were in Shakespeare’s time. Across
seventeenth-century Europe came the arrival of tools like the microscope by
which people could know the workings
of the body through the only sense that came to matter: sight. The four humours that had explained
health, disease and even personality for thousands of years fell from grace,
though humoral treatments like ‘bleeding’ continued into the nineteenth
century. The ‘mortal coil’ described by Hamlet, the political and social world we
inhabit, was also transformed – the rise of democracy and secularism in the
West and the end of the ‘great chain of being’ (a hierarchy that kept us all in
check) giving rise to individualism and the modern, introspective self. Today
it is the brain, not the heart, that is the centre of our feelings, memories
and identities, though the symbolism of the heart survives.

Valentine Card, 1928. Credit:
Wellcome Library.

How did the brain come to dominate? Here as elsewhere, philosophical
change accompanied technological and scientific change. The French philosopher René
Descartes
moved the soul from the heart, which had recently been confirmed as a pump by
the English physician William Harvey, to the pineal gland, located behind the
eyebrows. Mind and body were torn asunder; in time, ‘mind’ (which once
described soul), simply meant brain. From the nineteenth century, scientific medicine
gave rise to new ways of viewing the body through measurement and comparison.
New norms were created. Gender and racial differences were etched into the
fabric of our bodies – into the shape of our skulls, the structure of our
skeletons, the thickness of our skins. Scientific medicine provided new rules
to follow, new versions of the truth that were not driven by the imagination,
folklore or symbols. But like any other narrative, it was a product of its time,
creating stories that rationalised racism and sexism.

Descartes: The Nervous System. Diagram of the brain and the pineal gland.
From De Homine (1662). Credit:
Wellcome Library.

Through a series of case studies into the history and meanings of the
skin, fatness, the female breasts and genitals, the tongue and the skeleton, This Mortal Coil considers how we have
invested each of our body parts with meanings that reveal the needs of culture,
politics and society. Thus seventeenth-century women’s tongues were so dangerous
in an age of political uncertainty that the ‘scold’s bridle’ was needed to keep
them in check. From the nineteenth century, when the industrial age privileged efficiency, being ‘fat’ represented
waste and inefficiency, heaping moral outrage on the (increasingly lower-class)
obese. In the 1950s the possession of small breasts was redefined as a
psychiatric problem, easily fixed by a new type of medical practitioner: the
cosmetic surgeon. Today the threat of the female genitals, a source of
terrifying power for Shakespeare as for Freud, is contained by language: how
much safer is it to see the vagina as a ‘birth canal’ rather than a source of
untamed physical pleasure?

Belgian Iron bridle that fitted over the head of a woman sentenced for
being a ‘scold’.

Metaphors matter because they shape our worlds, whether depicting the
brain as a computer or the pubic hair as a lady garden. Illness is a battle we
fight against invaders: we win or we lose, we live or we die. In conventional
medicine we are divisible into separate systems and organs. There is no soul or
immaterial essence. Yet many of us still believe in one. The heart might be a
pump that beats 120,000 times a day, sending blood, nutrients and oxygen around
the body. But some people maintain heart transplants move more than an organ, transferring
the personality, habits and memoriesof the donors. Today the
separation of mind and body suggests we can take control of our physical shell,
disciplining it through exercise or cosmetic surgery in search of that perfect
ideal. We regard our bodies objectively, as though distinct from the self that
lives in our brains. Yet the incidence of mental illness is increasing. As is
the demand for whole-body treatment. We are arguably
more dis-eased about our bodies than
ever before.

Ultimately, This Mortal Coil explores
the stories we tell about the body. It does not demonise modern medicine. Nor
does it suggest that we were all better off when we lived, like my mother, in a
pre-modern world of imagination where we could each lay claim to our bodies
without the intervention of science. But this book does ask whether the decline
of holistic views of the body, that saw our minds, bodies and emotional worlds
as part of a functioning, social whole, has done us a disservice. For surely we
are more than the sum of our parts.

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